Slaughtered by Isis, now living in fear of US airstrikes

A victim of a shell fired by Isis at Mosul residents while they were queueing for aidAHMAD AL-RUBAYE/GETTY IMAGES

If the blood-encrusted stretchers outside the improvised field clinic could speak, they would tell a story that many of those they carry cannot.

It is the tale of what happens when an urban battlefield packed with hundreds of thousands of trapped civilians, weak with hunger, is pounded with heavy weaponry, airstrikes and machinegun fire; where those who try to flee are mercilessly slaughtered by Islamic State, which in its death throes in west Mosul is intent on taking as many innocent lives as it can.

“I am angry with all sides,” Amal Ahmed said as she comforted Dalia, her listless 12-year-old daughter, while doctors swabbed the girl’s wounds. Pulled from the rubble of a collapsed building in the Mosul Jadida district of the city, where…